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Subject: OASIS Call for Participation: Semantic Support for Electronic Business Document Interoperability (SET) TC
To: OASIS members & interested parties A new OASIS technical committee is being formed. The OASIS Semantic Support for Electronic Business Document Interoperability (SET) Technical Committee has been proposed by the members of OASIS listed below. The proposal, below, meets the requirements of the OASIS TC Process [a]. The TC name, statement of purpose, scope, list of deliverables, audience, and language specified in the proposal will constitute the TC's official charter. Submissions of technology for consideration by the TC, and the beginning of technical discussions, may occur no sooner than the TC's first meeting. This TC will operate under our 2005 IPR Policy [b]. The eligibility requirements for becoming a participant in the TC at the first meeting (see details below) are that: (a) you must be an employee of an OASIS member organization or an individual member of OASIS; (b) the OASIS member must sign the OASIS membership agreement [c]; (c) you must notify the TC chair of your intent to participate at least 15 days prior to the first meeting, which members may do by using the "Join this TC" button on the TC's public page at [d]; and (d) you must attend the first meeting of the TC, at the time and date fixed below. Of course, participants also may join the TC at a later time. OASIS and the TC welcomes all interested parties. Non-OASIS members who wish to participate may contact us about joining OASIS [c]. In addition, the public may access the information resources maintained for each TC: a mail list archive, document repository and public comments facility, which will be linked from the TC's public home page at [d]. Please feel free to forward this announcement to any other appropriate lists. OASIS is an open standards organization; we encourage your feedback. Regards, Mary --------------------------------------------------- Mary P McRae Manager of TC Administration, OASIS email: mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org web: www.oasis-open.org [a] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php [b] http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php [c] See http://www.oasis-open.org/join/ [d] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=set CALL FOR PARTICIPATION OASIS Semantic Support for Electronic Business Document Interoperability (SET) TC a. Name of the TC OASIS Semantic Support for Electronic Business Document Interoperability (SET) Technical Committee b. Statement of purpose No document standard is sufficient for all purposes because the requirements significantly differ amongst businesses, industries and geo-political regions. On the other hand, the ultimate aim of business document interoperability is to exchange business data among partners without any prior agreements related to the document syntax and semantics. Therefore, an important characteristic of a document standard is its ability to adapt to different contexts, its extensibility and customization. UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) is an important landmark in this direction. UN/CEFACT CCTS provides a methodology to identify a set of reusable building blocks, called Core Components to create electronic documents. Core Components represent the common data elements of everyday business documents such as ?Address?, ?Amount?, or ?Line Item?. These reusable building blocks are then assembled into business documents such as ?Order? or ?Invoice? by using the CCTS methodology. Core components are defined to be context-independent so that they can later be restricted to different contexts. Many core components defined by UN/CEFACT are available to users from UN/CEFACT Core Component Library. CCTS is gaining widespread adoption by both the horizontal and the vertical standard groups. Universal Business Language (UBL) was the first implementation of the CCTS methodology. Some earlier horizontal standards such as Global Standard One (GS1) XML and Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS), and some vertical industry standards such as CIDX and RosettaNet have also taken up CCTS. The OASIS SET TC aims to specify semantic mechanisms to achieve interoperability among document standards based of UN/CEFACT CCTS used in B2B, B2G and G2G applications by continuing work initiated by the iSURF Project (http://www.iSURFProject.eu) in three respects: i. Semantic Support for Context Domains Core component based document schema customization allows the modification of standard components in response to contextual needs. Schemas can be extended by adding new components or can be restricted by removing components or by limiting cardinality of components to a subset. Eight context categories have also been introduced. When a document schema needs to be customized for a context, users need to manually discover or provide component versions applicable to that particular context. The OASIS SET TC aims to specify semantic support mechanisms to provide machine processable semantic representations for the context domains to annotate core components to facilitate their discovery and reuse. This semantic will be obtained from the taxonomies and code lists already in use in the industry. This will allow the development of automated processes that intelligently search through custom components by interpreting class-subclass, equivalence and other relationships specified in context ontologies and gather applicable versions of components. ii. Semantic Support for Customization of Core Components and Business Document Schemas Core component based business document schemas are composed of several basic and aggregate components. Aggregate components themselves are collections of other basic and aggregate components in a recursive manner. Many aggregate components in this hierarchy are included by other components and document schemas themselves. So customizing an intermediate component for a context implicitly customizes all document schemas including that component for the same context. In order to customize a document schema for a particular business context, it is necessary to traverse the component hierarchy of the schema and gather applicable custom versions. Furthermore, a business context value may consist of values from multiple context categories. Semantic support will be provided for this purpose by using context ontologies. The ability to automate schema customization will lead to a significant new flexibility, that is, it becomes possible to merge multiple versions of a component to generate additional versions of that particular component. This greatly simplifies the component customization effort as it is no longer necessary to manually provide customized components for every single business context. Instead, it is sufficient to customize components for individual context categories since combinations for multiple categories can be automatically generated as needed. When a target context value includes multiple categories or has multiple parents or a mixture of both, component repository may contain multiple applicable versions of a particular component. For such cases, the derivation rules from individual versions will be automatically serialized by successively applying them to the corresponding document component. iii. Semantic Support for Document Translation OASIS SET TC will provide a machine processable mechanism that can express the structure and the semantics of components together with their correspondences in different versions. In this way, it will become possible to develop tools to help with semantic translation of Core component based electronic business documents. For this purpose, first a UBL ?Component Ontology? will be developed. In the later phases, this ontology will be expanded to cover other document standards based on CCTS. The Component Ontology serves two major purposes: ? Representing the semantics of components: Document customization takes place at the level of individual types and elements; hence, translation needs to be done at the same level. When an automated process compares two versions of a schema, it needs to be able to identify corresponding elements in these schemas. When document elements are represented as classes of a common component ontology, it becomes possible to utilize that ontology for the computation of similarities between elements from different schemas. ? Representing the structure of document schemas: Core component based document schemas are complex hierarchies including numerous types and elements any of which might be modified through customization. Even in the case of semantically equivalent components, comparison is a complicated task unless supported by proper tools. By representing the structural layout of types and elements using classes from common component ontology, it becomes possible to utilize semantic reasoners for the comparison of these complex hierarchies. c. Scope CCTS is gaining widespread adoption by both the horizontal and the vertical standard groups. Universal Business Language (UBL) was the first implementation of the CCTS methodology. Some earlier horizontal standards such as Global Standard One (GS1) XML and Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS), and some vertical industry standards such as CIDX and RosettaNet have also taken up CCTS. However, all these standards apply CCTS differently as detailed in: Kabak Y., Dogac A., ?A Survey and Analysis of Electronic Business Document Standards?, http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/webpage/publications The SET TC will assess the existing CCTS based document standards to define and implement semantic support for interoperability among them starting with different customization of UBL document schemas and will provide tool support and a testbed for testing interoperability. d. Deliverables OASIS SET TC will develop three Technical Specifications described below, and also may elect to issue Technical Reports and White Papers: ? Specification of semantic support mechanisms to provide machine processable semantic representations for the context domains to annotate core components to facilitate their discovery and reuse -- final version available in December 2008 (the TC may issue intermediate versions as frequently as every 6 months) ? Specification of Semantic Support for Customization of Core Components and Business Document Schemas in June 2009 (intermediate versions may be available as frequently as every 6 months) ? Specification of machine processable mechanisms that can express the structure and the semantics of components together with their correspondences in different versions ? Technical Reports will be drafted as appropriate ? White Papers as appropriate e. IPR Mode SET TC will operate under "RF on Limited Terms" mode. f. Anticipated audience The anticipated audience for this work includes members of the Ontolog Forum, OASIS ebXML Registry TC, OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) TC, non-OASIS Business and Government Document standards groups, the related units of NIST, programmers, vendors and users. The work should be of interest to anyone involved with Electronic Business Documents. g. Language. English. The TC may elect to form subcommittees that produce localized documentation of the TC's work in additional languages. (2) Non-normative information regarding the startup of the TC (2)(a) Identification of similar or applicable work that is being done in other OASIS TCs or by other organizations The following standards work has been identified to be related with this TC: ? UN/CEFACT CCTS provides the basis of the work proposed. The work proposed in the SET TC complements the CCTS approach through semantic mechanisms. The SET TC will try to establish a liaison with UN/CEFACT. ? OASIS UBL TC: This is the most related standard since it is the first XML implementation of UN/CEFACT CTTS. The SET TC will complement this standard by providing the semantic discovery, reuse, customization and translation of CTTS based documents. UBL TC co-chair, Tim McGrath is a co-proposer of the SET TC. ? OASIS ebXML Registry TC: The semantic annotation and discovery of the document components will be achieved through the ebXML Registry. The SET TC founding member, Asuman Dogac has already provided an OASIS ebXML Registry Technical Committee approved Committee Draft: o Dogac A., ?ebXML Registry Profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL)?, OASIS ebXML Registry Technical Committee approved Committee Draft. Further liaison will be established with the ebXML Registry related with how to store and annotate core components as the work progresses. OASIS SEE TC: The SEE TC concentrates on providing a semantic environment for the execution of Web services. The SET TC, on the other hand, will concentrate on the document interoperability of electronic business documents which use UN/CEFACT CCTS. Further liaison will be sought with the SEE TC for transporting documents using Web services in a SoA architecture. (2)(b) The date, time, and location of the first meeting, whether it will be held in person or by telephone, and who will sponsor this first meeting July 11, 2008, 15:00 GMT Teleconference, using Skype (Istanbul 5pm, Boston 10am, Los Angeles 7am) (2)(c) The projected on-going meeting schedule for the year following the formation of the TC Monthly teleconferences using Skype (2)(d). The names, electronic mail addresses, and membership affiliations of at least Minimum Membership who support this proposal and are committed to the Charter and projected meeting schedule Asuman Dogac from METU, Organizational Member of OASIS, asuman@srdc.metu.edu.tr Tim McGrath, Document Engineering Services, tim.mcgrath@documentengineeringservices.com Stephen D. Green, SystML, Stephen.green@systml.co.uk Matteo Busanelli, ENEA UDA PMI, matteo.busanelli@bologna.enea.it Arianna Brutti, ENEA UDA PMI, arianna.brutti@bologna.enea.it Paavo Kotinurmi, D.Sc.(Tech.), Helsinki University of Technology, Paavo.Kotinurmi@tkk.fi Johann Höchtl, Zentrum für E-Government, johann.hoechtl@donau-uni.ac.at Yildiray Kabak from METU, yildiray@srdc.metu.edu.tr Mustafa Yuksel from METU, mustafa@srdc.metu.edu.tr Fulya Tuncer from METU, fulya@srdc.metu.edu.tr Alper Okcan from METU, alper@srdc.metu.edu.tr Gunes Aluc from METU, gunes@srdc.metu.edu.tr Anil Sinaci from METU, anil@srdc.metu.edu.tr (2)(e). The name of the Convener who must be an Eligible Person: Asuman Dogac will be the convenor. (2)(f). The name of the Member Section with which the TC intends to affiliate, if any: The TC is not planning to affiliate with a Member Section at this time. (2)(g). List of contributions of existing technical work 1. Yarimagan Y., Dogac A., ?Semantics Based Customization of UBL Document Schemas?, Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases, Springer-Verlag, Volume 22, Numbers 2-3 / December 2007, pp. 107-131. 2. Yarimagan Y., Dogac A., ?A Semantic based Solution for the Interoperability of UBL Schemas?, IEEE Internet Computing, to appear. 3. Yarimagan Y., ?Semantic Enrichment for the Automated Customization and Interoperability of UBL Schemas?, PhD Thesis, Dept. of Computer Eng., Middle East Technical University, March 2008. 4. Kabak Y., Dogac A., ?A Survey and Analysis of Electronic Business Document Standards?, Submitted for publication. 5. Piero de Sabbata, Nicola Gessa, Guido Cucchiara, Thomas Imolesi, Fabio Vitali, "Supporting eBusiness with a dictionary designed in a vertical standardisation perspective", proceedings of IEEE CEC 2005, Monaco July 19-22 2005. 6. Piero De Sabbata, Nicola Gessa, Cristiano Novelli, Angelo Frascella, Fabio Vitali, "B2B: Standardisation or Customistation?", in "Innovation and the Knowledge Economy Issues, Application, Case Studies", e-Challenges 2005 conference, Ljubljiana, October 19-21 2005, edited by Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham, pp 1556-1566, IIMC International Information Management Corporation LTD, Dublin, Ireland, IOS PRESS, ISBN 1-58603-563-0 7. Piero De Sabbata, Nicola Gessa, Matteo Busanelli, Arianna Brutti, Angelo Frascella, "Providing a semantic description for an interoperability framework using ontologies", in proceedings of e-Challenges 2006 conference, Barcelona, October 25-27 2006 References 1, 2 and 4 are available from: http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/publications Reference 3 will be available from the TC home page. (2)(h). Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): Will be provided later. (2)(i). Optionally, a proposed working title and acronym for the specification(s) to be developed by the TC: Will be provided later.
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